Welcome to the Yellow Orb, a Seattlites Journey in Utah. This where I get to tell my stories of all of the wonders, fun and bumps along the way of living in Utah.
Enjoy my latest posts, or read below to see how we got here.
Growing up my family was always moving, so I always had a feeling I would never live anywhere for more than a few years at best. Joining the army confirmed that perspective as I was never in any one place too long. But after I got married and started a family things seemed to change. As a young couple with only three kids we decided to move to the Pacific Northwest. For the first few years my perspective of always moving seemed to be holding strong. In the first few years in the Pacific Northwest we moved five times. That was all within Western Washington, but each place was somewhat different.
Then we moved to Seattle. This was unlike any move I had ever made before, but that is a whole different story. Anyway we settled down in Seattle. The house we purchased was quite the fixer-upper, so we were always busy fixing up this or that. Between that and other things time seemed to just move on. At one point I started thinking it was odd that we were still in Seattle. We had been there a few years and seemed to be staying.
Staying? What did that mean. Now it isn’t like I liked moving, I didn’t. It was a lot of work. But it seemed life for us was such that after a few years in one place some kind of issue would come up for which the only solution was moving.
But here I was living in Seattle for over 5 years. I don’t remember living anywhere for that long before. Not only was I still in Seattle but there was no problem pushing us to move on. In fact the opposite was happening. Between all of the sweat equity we had put into our house and our wonderful friends I just couldn’t see ever moving.
Now I’m not saying Seattle was perfect. We certainly had our share, and then some, of problems. But none of them had the answer of “move”. As the years went by we became more and more entrenched in our neighborhood and in Seattle in general. I had finally concluded that this was it. I was never going to move again.
Like so many things in live just when you think you have it all figured out HaShem proves you wrong. Not only was I not looking to move when the possibility came up it nearly took a miracle (miracles would be more accurate) for it all to come together.
But after 15 years in Seattle and over 20 in the Pacific Northwest we were moving and of all places to Utah. I don’t think I had ever been to Utah before. Maybe I was as a young child, but I don’t remember. But this is where HaShem was bringing us.
There are a few similarities. Both have lots of mountains. Both are . . . well maybe there is just one similarity. Beyond that they are quite different. I’m not sure if I could have had more differences if I moved to the moon.
After you live in one place for long enough you slowly absorb the culture of the place into who you are. After 15 years in Seattle I had become a Seattleite. I had come to expect to see green everywhere and I am not just talking about the trees. I had come to expect rain to be a constant. And most of all I had grown to expect the sky to be gray.
All of those expectations faded away when I moved to this strange land of The Yellow Orb.